CeBIT 2008 Coverage: Part 3. Page 3

This time we explore more mainboards aimed at extreme overclockers that have LN2 blocks and liquid-cooling installed, laptops made of bamboo by Asus, high-end gaming notebooks from OCZ/Hypersonic, home theater personal computer by MSI as well as forthcoming cooling systems from Scythe.

Intoxicated with Performance: Asustek Presents Pinot Noir Motherboard

The wide lineup of Asustek Computer’s mainboards designed for gamers and performance enthusiasts clearly shows that such customers do like products from this maker and gladly buy its motherboards. At this year’s CeBIT the company demonstrated its Pinot Noir motherboard that is likely to become one of the top-of-the-range solutions in the Republic of Gamers family.

Asus Pinot Noir is currently a prototype mainboard belonging to ROG series and due out in the next few months. The mainboard supports various Intel Core 2 microprocessors with up to 1600MHz processor system bus, DDR3 memory as well as all the latest interfaces, such as PCI Express 2.0, Serial ATA-300 and so on. Asus Pinot Noir is based on Intel X48 core-logic, but unlike the rest motherboards featuring this chipset it has three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots for graphics adapters.

Given the sizes of onboard cooling systems, certain high-end air-based microprocessor coolers may face compatibility issues with the mainboard. But either Asus engineers imply that liquid-based cooling system for central processing units (CPUs) is a must on Pinot Noir mainboard, or the company plans to recommend certain coolers for installation on its premium solution.

One of the unique features Asus Pinot Noir has is golden capacitor onboard. The capacitor can store enough energy to continue rotating cooling fans after the system was turned off in order to eliminate possible issues caused by overheating.

Golden capacitor on Asus Pinot Noir mainboard

Pricing of Asus Pinot Noir is unknown at present, but it is unlikely to be even in the range of $250, considering nearly completely different design compared to Rampage Formula, another advanced Intel X48-based product by Asustek, as well as plethora of advanced features.